On 08/08/2012 08:22 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 12:43 -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:
On 08/07/2012 11:16 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 10:44 -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:
On 08/07/2012 07:38 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
I don't recognize the text of this license in a piece of software I need to package as a dependency. The license listed on PyPi is "Freeware" which doesn't seem right (and isn't a valid option anyway) but the actual license text looks more permissive, except for the bit about "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." That clause looks like it might cause us some trouble...
Can I get a legal opinion? (The complete sources of the utility are attached, including the license text in question).
I'm also going to contact upstream to see if I can get a license clarification.
As several other people have noted, this is the infamous jsmin license. The upstream jsmin author takes a perverse pleasure in people ramming headfirst into this nonsensical clause, and has repeatedly stated that he will not remove it or reword it in such a way to resolve the issues it causes.
http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code has some of the backstory.
Thanks, this is useful to hear. It was exactly the JSMin package I was trying to deal with. That's most unfortunate. I'll contact the Review Board upstream and let them know that their dependency on this package will get them into trouble.
I believe that v8 has a re-implementation of jsmin from scratch to work around this issue, it may be useful as a replacement.
Following up on this further, I just discovered that the package python-webassets is bundling jsmin (complete with unacceptable license) in Fedora. See /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/webassets/filter/jsmin/jsmin.py in python-webassets-0.7-1.fc17.noarch
I assume this is cause for alarm.
Yep. Please open a bug and block FE-Legal.
~tom
== Fedora Project
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Tom Callaway